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A year ago, Salvador Cappiello joined Instagram looking for creative liberty. He used the app for a while, but Cappiello wanted a more unique way of making images. He began to experiment.

Cappiello is director and founder of a public relations firm in Caracas, Venezuela. In PR, he explained in Spanish, “you’re keeping (images) in very defined terms.” To Cappiello, Instagram is a space without those terms.

He started making a series of diptychs, juxtaposing headless figures with cloudy skies. “My emphasis was trying to feel where somebody’s head was during a physical activity,” he explains.

Cappiello got feedback from his followers to push this idea further. “I always thought about people that stood guard… as people that would have a lot of time on their hands, and their head would be in the clouds.”

In Valencia, a town two hours outside Caracas, Cappiello came across a guard donning a bright red uniform with gold embroidery. The portrait became the bottom half of Cappiello’s winning image in KPCC’s most recent Instagram Challenge with Instagram Lovers Anonymous. The theme was “Manipulation,” in which we asked Instagrammers to alter an image to tell a new story.

In a way, Cappiello’s winning image is symbolic of his reasons for joining Instagram. And through the mobile app, he’s found a community of other “creative addicts,” as he calls himself. “The freedom to present these pictures,” he said, “to share and interact with thousands of people around the world, is incredible.”

Follow Salvador Cappiello on Instagram at @cappiello. Follow @kpcc and @igla to join in our next Instagram challenge!

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Off-Ramp is a lively weekly look at Southern California through the eyes and ears of radio veteran John Rabe. News, arts, home, life... covering everything that makes life here exciting, enjoyable, and interesting.